Int 1

Upstate

The Borscht Belt in upstate New York is a particularly forlorn paradise. Beautiful, empty, desolate, bereft of purpose; foreclosed. From the 1920s to the late 1970s hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers left the city each summer to seek respite in the Arcadian promise, budget accommodation, kosher food and the raucous black humour of the Catskills. By the early 1960s, however, resorts were in a terminal decline triggered by the end of the postwar economic boom and hastened by the competition of budget air travel. Now long-vacant, the undoubted romanticism of these environments is underscored by the crass realism of failure.

Intermediate 1 explored this paradox – the conjunction of beauty and uselessness – by travelling upstate, from New York City to the abandoned vacation resorts of the Borscht Belt, nestled into the Catskill Mountains. These investigations drove the unit’s ongoing fascination with the passing temporality of architecture and the residues of such failed utopias. We began with Stanley Kubrick’s epic account of misspent vacations – The Shining (1980) – as a premise for questioning the architectural potential, ‘fake histories’ and cultural resonances of the Borscht Belt. Acting as archaeologists of the immediate future’ (to paraphrase Reyner Banham), our design considerations then sought to uncover misplaced artefacts, failed architectural precedents and images of past declines and future ambitions.

Projects included shrink-wrapping a community of preserved bungalows; relocating a resort to the west side of Manhattan; reinventing Grossinger’s Catskills Resort as a Grand (rather than merely large) hotel; a chess camp for the exiled (and reviled) American grandmaster, Bobby Fischer; an archived junkyard of abandoned architectures; a cultivated wilderness; a descaled, 

not-so-luxury (but viable) resort; relocating the town of Liberty inside the shell of the resort that bankrupted it; a yoga retreat; a demolition festival; and a reimagined Kosher town and bungalow community.